elfs | Are Microsoft users abuse victims?

Omaha asked me this, in relationship to her Mac, but I have to wonder about it in general. I mean, it really does start to sound like it sometimes: "Oh, it's not Windows' fault, it's mine. Really. If I worked harder at our relationship, I wouldn't have the crashes and the viruses and the spam. I just have to do what Bill tells me, and it will all be okay, right? I mean, that's really the issue. I stay because I know it'll get better. It will. I've put too much time and effort into it to give up now."

Just musing.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Don Davis, Furious Angel

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From: (Anonymous)

I'm one of the lucky ones, I guess -- as much as I could not care less for MS, I find their operating system stable, intuitive and granting just the right balance of user-friendliness with tinkerability. Granted, I'm an incorrigible gamer, so certainly appreciate the software selection.

As for Linux, I haven't had the pleasure, but am definately interested. Unfortunately, it seems every Linux user I hear from is always submerged in an endless process of getting it to work just they way they want to. I understand your issues have been mainly hardware related, but your LJ is hardly an advert for Linux's state of usability. That said, I do look forward to paying less for an OS distribution that I do for the games I run on it, and Linux is my official best bet for the future.

Alas, I've never gelled with Macs, which I'm forced to use 8 hours a day at work. It's an endless catalog of frustration, most of it related to the relative slowness of it all. I know there's no technical basis for this, but macs have less bang for the buck and business machines angle toward buck concerns. Everytime I hear talk of redundancies I look at the useless, expense-incurring stylings of our luxolamp imacs and shudder at the gullibility of management. I guess we need LCD monitors more than the workers who use them...

I've seen G5 and look forward to giving it a go, but pre-X is like Win98, except it doesn't actually tell you why it's slow and crashtastic. And OS X is a nasty triumph of formism, forcing a host of unintuitive, different-for-the-sake-of-being-different uselessnesses on the hapless user. It's almost like a crusade against OS "invisibility," right down to the loathesome dock, in which some icon must always bounce for attention like some kind of OCD frog from a 1970s arcade game.

Of course, that's only my mileage. If I'm an abuse victim, I hadn't noticed it.

From: (Anonymous)

A fellow Anonymous wrote:

"It's almost like a crusade against OS "invisibility," right down to the loathesome dock, in which some icon must always bounce for attention like some kind of OCD frog from a 1970s arcade game."

In Dock Preferences, uncheck "Animate Opening Applications." End of bouncing icons.

I'm forced to use Windows at work. Pity we can't trade...